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Thursday, November 17, 2005
Things not to see while it's snowing in Denver 
| | I'm sitting in a lounge here in Concourse B in Denver (the airport is actually in Kansas, almost), where heavy snow falls outside the window a couple feet to my left. I'm the only guy in the airport wearing just a t-shirt, I think. It was clear and beautiful when I left Santa Barbara before dawn. Although The West between Santa Barbara and Utah was under a bit of haze, the view out the window was spectacular. The clouds over Colorado matched the mountains perfectly. Between breaks in the clouds, even the valleys were coated in snow. As we landed, the snow clouds were just easing in over Denver. Nice show. |
| | The picture above is in my current sunrise series, mostly taken from our house, or near it, in Santa Barbara. We're not that high, really — about 500 feet — but enough to look down on clouds from time to time. Tuesday, when I took this shot, was one of those times. Miss home already. |
Moving along
| | I'm flying East on biz for a few daze. Blogging will be light, probably. Or maybe dark. |
Ballrolling
| | In dozens of nations around the world, the state takes part in censoring what their citizens can see and do on the Internet. This practice is increasingly widespread. Filtering regimes are becoming more sophisticated and more commonplace around the world as the Internet assumes greater importance as a means of communication, as a forum for doing business, and as a hotbed of political activism. There's a cat-and-mouse game being played between states that seek to control the information environment and citizens who seek to speak and read and interact freely online. |
| | The OpenNet Initiative -- a joint research project of the University of Cambridge, the University of Toronto, and Harvard Law School -- has found and documented extensive filtering regimes in place in China, Iran, Burma (Myanmar), Uzbekistan, and, yes, Tunisia, among many other countries (many reports and bulletins here). Censorship using technological filters is often coupled with harsh laws related to what the press can publish, opaque surveillance practices, and severe penalties for people who break the state¹s rules of using the Internet. |
| | We blog among ourselves, but we don't send letters to Congress. |
| | If bloggers won't fire up the word processor, it's time to bring the letter-writing machinery to the blog software. |
| | I did a proof of concept (polite phrase for "crap-ass hack that happens to work for me...today") of a Blosxom "flavour" that turns any entry into a letter to my Rep. in Congress: congress.tar.gz |
| | (Yes, I've been using it for a while.) |
| | Use your member of Congress' local address, not the jammed-up-still-searching-everything-for-anthrax DC address. |
| | (Oh, and pre-address and pre-stamp a bunch of envelopes, so you just have to blog, hit "letter", print, sign, fold, and seal.) |
| | I got a nice letter back from Rep. Stark about the DMCRA, too. This does work. Repeat: This does work. |
| | One good criticism, from Eric Raymond, was that I didn't make my case right up front. David Weinberger, in fact, had the same advise after I showed him a draft of the piece. Shoulda taken it. |
| | As a result, a lot of people took the first section as The Whole Thing. It's not. It's titled "Scenario I: The Carriers Win". In it I tried to gather and present the best thinking and information that the pessimists have gathered for us. Just as I tried in the following section to summarize what (at least some) optimists believe. |
| | And even if every broadband provider enacted such restrictions simultaneously to prevent users from fleeing, (something that would be extraordinarily difficult to coordinate and probably a violation of antitrust laws) it¹s unlikely that would be the end of the story. The Internet backbone isn¹t just used by consumer broadband users. It¹s also used by universities, major corporate customers, governments, users in other countries, etc. It¹s exceedingly unlikely that they would go along with transforming the Internet into a closed, proprietary infotainment network owned by the Baby Bells and the cable industry. And as long as a critical mass of the Internet remained open, there would be a powerful demand for home access to that Internet. Comcast and Verizon might cut off access, but someone — perhaps an independent WiMax or satellite provider — would find a way to bring it to them (and would get filthy rich doing so). And there are so many neat services on the Internet not controlled by the broadband industry that the closed Internet would face an exodus of customers the moment they had a choice. |
| | Big media, big business, and big ISPs like the place metaphor of the dot-com era. They like thinking that they own something and that they've got the eyeballs, visitors, or subscribers. This metaphor leads to business models based on walled gardens to trap customers and keep them from going somewhere else. |
| | Of course, what we want is a place where silos aren't the only choices, right? That's what the Net is — A place that helps solve the silo problem. |
| | I fully agree with the central point of Doc¹s essay. (I chastised him gently for burying it amidst too much clutter.) There is a war of metaphors going on right now: the Internet as place versus the Internet as pipes. Is it an agora (that handy Greek word that hovers somewhere between "marketplace" and "public square") or a "content-delivery system"? |
| | How people think about this matters. As Doc points out, if the net-as-pipes metaphor prevails, then issues like free-speech rights and open access become subordinated to property rights over the pipes. If the net-as-agora metaphor prevails, free speech trumps property rights — even when the "agora" space is privately owned, our mental framework about it is that it¹s a place where public expression is subject to minimum control. |
| | Doc and Larry point out that the big corporations pushing for semi-infinite copyright extensions have been winning battles because they have presented a compelling narrative in which copyright is property, and Americans (by and large) think property is good. |
| | Here¹s our problem: we need to come up with a compelling narrative of the Internet-as-agora without challenging the property-is-good assumption. The FSF has been trying to disassociate copyrights/patents/trademarks from property for years (RMS regularly lectures people on why the term "intellectual property" is bad) but it has failed. We need better tactics than that. We need a propertarian case for the Internet as agora. |
| | Tama Leaver is also in general agreement, but uncomfortable with my U.S.-centric point of view: |
| | While I think that Doc is on the money with the Net-as-place idea, what annoys me a little on reading 'Save the Net' is the strong sense that the Net is an American place. If I give money to the EFF (which I have and probably will again), it seems to largely go in fighting legal battles in the US. More annoyingly, the Australian laws and regulations slowly echo the US ones, but without a Bill of Rights underlying them (which, as you can imagine, is rather problematic). I guess it's not Doc that's annoying me, but the fact that I don't see how this will change in the immediate future ... even as an Australian blogger, my concerns with partipatory culture and the blogopshere mean about 70 - 80% of the material here comes from US sources. *sigh* |
| | She's right about my 'centrism, though I certainly didn't mean to suggest that the Net is "an American place". The fact that its not is to everybody's great advantage. However, as I said here, the U.S. is where a great deal of cluelessness about the Net is concentrated, and where laws are forming that have the potential to screw up the whole world. |
Has anybody else noticed
| | — that Technorati has gotten pretty damn fast? And doesn't go down much (or at all, far as I know) any more? (Disclosure: I'm on its advisory board, but was no less frustrated than everybody else when Technorati's infrastructure had problems.) |
For every traction there is an equal and opposite distraction
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